MeeGo conference eyes uses beyond phones

Stephen Lawson, IDG News Services |
May 23, 2011

Supporters of the MeeGo open-source platform put tablets, in-car systems and TV in the spotlight at a conference in San Francisco on Monday, saying the technology had broad potential while downplaying its role in smartphones.

Supporters of the MeeGo open-source platform put tablets, in-car systems and TV in the spotlight at a conference in San Francisco on Monday, saying the technology had broad potential while downplaying its role in smartphones.

The MeeGo Conference drew more developers than a similar meeting last November in Dublin, Ireland, said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, which manages the MeeGo project. Though he didn't mention Nokia by name, the biggest change to rock MeeGo since the Dublin meeting was Nokia's decision in February to drop most of its use of the platform in smartphones. Perhaps not surprisingly, the focus Monday was on non-mobile uses of MeeGo.

On Monday, Zemlin and guest speakers on stage emphasized MeeGo's potential in embedded systems and in tablets, one of which is being sold already in Germany. Raising the rallying cry of open source, Zemlin said MeeGo could do for other types of devices what Linux did for servers and supercomputers. As with Linux, MeeGo is free and its development is carried out by a community whose work is simply orchestrated by working groups. Last week, version 1.2 of the platform was released.

"We're really in the first five minutes of a very long game with MeeGo," Zemlin said. Open-source software has fundamental advantages over proprietary platforms in keeping device costs low, getting products out to the market quickly and letting developers control their own destiny, he said.

During the keynote session, 4tiitoo founder and CEO Tore Meyer demonstrated his company's WeTab, which runs an operating system based on MeeGo and is commercially available in Germany. The WeTab's touchscreen features small navigation spaces on either edge of the screen for users to move around Web pages, slideshows and other content with their thumbs. The tablet is a platform for showing off 4tiitoo's user interface, which it hopes to extend to a broad range of devices including smartphones and set-top boxes in the future, he said.